Need a reason to watch Kapoor & Sons? This Fawad Khan fan from India lists so many

Let me just say this very simply, OK, without any culture studies costume and Aman ki Asha accessories.

I love Fawad in the springtime

I love Fawad in the fall

I love Fawad when there is bin mausam barsat

And I love Fawad when there’s no weather report at all

Now write ‘want” instead of “love” and hit replace all.

For a while now, an ominous gap has been making itself felt, a tear in our love panorama that is threatening to turn into a Shah Rukh-shaped hole.

I must hasten to say that I will love Shah Rukh Khan forever – as much to console myself as him. After all he was/is that lovely thing, a feminist hero of sorts – at ease enough with himself that he could share screen space with women, and still keep it passionate. From Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge to Chennai Express, Shah Rukh films have always had female characters whose desires, emotions and quirks were strongly present along with its hero’s.

Shah Rukh’s was not a masculinity that needed to be constantly inscribed across the whole narrative, taking up all the physical and emotional space available on screen. Combined with deep romantic intensity and the possibility of love and pleasure as a driving principle of life, Shah Rukh offered an optional masculinity that could love a different femininity. It is not for no reason then that he dominated the movies for such a long time.

But of late, SRK seems to have turned his gaze elsewhere, and of course we wait for him to return. But meanwhile, who is a woman to love if she wants to feel the pure pleasures of lust along with a feeling that she could actually talk to the object of lust if they were stuck on a desert island together? Enter Fawad Khan.

Fawad Khan entered our hearts through the television screen, unleashing collective sighs and creating weather disturbances across India thanks to his role in Zindagi Gulzar Hai and sweeping us up on a passionate breeze with his role as (what else?) a prince, in the film Khoobsurat. But of course, he had been there all along, we just didn’t know it, which makes this a delicious double take.

Those of us who had gone to see the Pakistani movie Khuda Kay Liye when it was released in Indian cinemas were too busy taking in the sumptuous pleasures of Shan’s beauty to notice Fawad. That was our shallow loss, and, as my friend said with earnest devotion as we discussed these important matters “that only shows how subtle Fawad is”. Yes, behen, I cannot disagree.

A movie star has two halves that join in our minds into one synapse-galvanising, neuron-igniting, all-systems-go whole – the persona on screen and the persona off-screen. Shah Rukh was intense, boyishly charming and family-loving on screen but irreverent, sexually tongue-in-cheek and thrillingly witty off-screen. It felt as if he wanted to make us laugh just so he could see the sparkle in our eyes.

Fawad is different. On screen he is brooding, composed and quite serious. Like Shah Rukh, he is comfortable sharing space with women characters, a practice he has perhaps perfected through the novelistic narratives of Pakistani TV series, which are not so weighed down with debating tradition and so liberally tell stories, often with strong female protagonists. He comes, in fact, from a storytelling space where romance is quite an important genre, and is a hero ready-made for it. Owing something to this storytelling space, he seems comfortable being a character rather than replaying an archetype, which makes him feel accessible, touchable, real.

And, of course, he’s hot with those soft brown eyes and spiky eyelashes and slow smile. You might almost never notice His Hotness until you suddenly do and then you notice little else, kind of like how we never noticed him in Khuda Kay Liye, then went, hell-lo and kept noticing. His eyes have both mystery and mischief and many other things you could spend a while observing.